The New Cult Canon: Fight Club

(Note:
This entry is intended for readers who have seen Fight Club. Others are advised to see
it first—and why haven't you already?—and come back later.)

"Advertising
has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we
don't need. We're the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have
no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war, our Great
Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that
one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't.
And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off." —Tyler Durden

With
that little monologue alone, Fight Club asserts itself—rightly, to my mind—as
the quintessential Generation X film. (At least for men, anyway. Women may
respond to it, too, much as an anthropologist might study a foreign species,
but its raw appeal is strictly for the XY set.) Based on Chuck Palahniuk's
short, staccato first novel about the withered state of modern masculinity, Fight Club offers the fantasy of
neutered men finding an outlet for their muted frustrations, a way of feeling something, even if that
feeling is sadness or pain. And since that outlet is an underground,
bare-knuckles fight club—and later, a full-on anarchist
movement—the film has been perceived as dangerous in much the same way as
a Marilyn Manson record or the latest Grand Theft Auto game rouses the moral
alarmists. If you stopped watching after the first hour or so, the film might
fairly be dismissed as socially irresponsible, but its attitudes and
conclusions are far more complex and ambivalent than its critics give it credit
for being.

In
fact, look past the ultra-violence and flashy punk aesthetic, and Fight Club would make a fine companion
piece to Mike Judge's Office
Space,
another film that not-so-coincidentally opened to mixed reviews, tanked in
theaters, and found an avid cult appreciation on DVD. (I'll cover it here
someday, I promise.) Though the anonymous protagonist played by Edward Norton
enjoys a slightly more upscale lifestyle than the Everyman played by Ron
Livingston in Office
Space,
they're essentially the same character: a dead-eyed cubicle-dweller who
experiences a life-changing revelation, snaps out of his numb funk, gleefully
bucks the rules, and eventually ropes others into criminal conspiracy. One is a
deadpan office comedy and the other a blood-spattered provocation, but both
strike a chord in people fed up with the soul-crushing, 9-to-5 busywork of TPS
reports and automobile-recall assessments. When Norton and Livingston suddenly
decide to liberate themselves from the straight and narrow, it's a wage slave's
dream, as exhilarating as any piece of Hollywood escapism could ever hope to
be.

Granted,
Fight
Club goes to
greater extremes than Office
Space: A few
guys defrauding a faceless company one fraction of penny at a time isn't the
same as a terrorist operation laying waste to 10 city skyscrapers that
represent the foundation of our credit system. But appropriately, Fight Club seriously questions the
limits of anarchy with the same fervor with which it dismantles the trappings
of consumer culture. The problem is, this tends to be the part that critics of
the film (and some viewers, too) usually miss when they dismiss it as nihilist
garbage, just like members of Tyler Durden's "Project Mayhem" choose to ignore
their leader when he has a change of heart. It's easy to accept rebellion,
because it's what we desire, but harder to examine the consequences, because we
don't like the hangover. If Fight Club could be considered "dangerous," the responsibility
for that lies more with the willful obliviousness of some viewers than the
moral deficiencies of its creators.

But
I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let us first consider "The Narrator"
(Norton), an average guy who wears a crisp white shirt and tie (but no jacket)
to work every day, and comes home to a cookie-cutter condo furnished by IKEA.
("What kind of dining set defines me as a person?" he wonders.) He's seized by
some indefinable anxiety and pain that's turned him into an insomniac, but his
doctor refuses to prescribe more than valerian root, exercise, and—if he
wants to see what real pain looks like—a visit to the support groups at
his local church-based community center. Slapping on nametags for made-up
personas like Cornelius and Rupert, the narrator slips into meetings for
tuberculosis, testicular cancer, and various strains of organ- and
brain-deteriorating parasites. The experience is a revelation, because the
suffering he witnesses is authentic and personal, and he can pretend that other
people's trials are his own. "Every evening I died," he says, "and every
evening I was born again, resurrected."

Just
when the narrator finally gets the nightly catharsis he needs for sleep, along
comes Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), a chain-smoking fellow support-group
"faker" whose presence prevents him from letting go. The two agree to split up
the classes, but Marla seems to have one up on him philosophically: She
operates without limits, whether swiping clothes from a Laundromat to sell on
the next block, or walking straight into traffic as if she could care less
about getting struck down. The narrator can see the freedom in that, and it's
no mistake that Tyler Durden appears to him shortly after he makes Marla's
acquaintance.

Played
by Brad Pitt with a movie star's brash confidence, Tyler is Mr. Hyde to the
narrator's Dr. Jekyll, a raging id who detests the deadening effects of consumer
culture and seeks to prank it out of existence. He explains that oxygen on
planes is intended not as a safety measure, but as a way to make passengers
high and euphoric, and thus more willing to accept their terrible fate. And in
a great exchange, he also dismantles a favorite Gen-X defense mechanism, humor,
when the narrator explains the concept of a "single-serving friend"—those
strangers that exist between take-off and landing, then evaporate like a
complimentary pat of butter:

Tyler:
Oh I get it.
It's very clever.

Narrator:
Thank you.

Tyler:
How's that
working out for you?

Narrator:
What?

Tyler:
Being
clever.

When
Tyler and the narrator meet again, the latter's life has literally gone out the
window, due to an explosion that's jettisoned the charred remains of his
yin-yang coffee table and other carefully selected "Fürni" from an upper floor
of his high-rise condo. Tyler gives him a room in a bombed-out rathole on the
edges of an industrial neighborhood, but more importantly, he invites the narrator
to hit him as hard as he can:

From
there, the two give birth to "Fight Club," a group that starts as a once-a-week
after-hours slugfest in a bar basement, a place for workaday types to unleash
their pent-up aggression and feel like men again. In spite of the first two
rules of Fight Club—both are "You do not talk about Fight Club"—membership
multiples exponentially in cities across the country, and Tyler expands its
scope via "Project Mayhem," a complex, militaristic operation that carries out
his brand of anarchic mischief. Some early missions are playful, like
demagnetizing tapes in a video store or planting alarming safety cards on
airplanes. But the grand design is that of a terrorist organization, with
independent cells concocting explosives out of household items and conspiring
to attack the system at its core.

At
this point, many people take leave of Fight Club, which admittedly never
regains the excitement of the first third, when it taps so strongly into the
purposeless, emasculating lives of Gen-X pencil-pushers. That yearning to feel anything, much less find meaning in
the world, is what Palahniuk and director David Fincher are attempting to make
palpable. For his part, Fincher captures the zeitgeist so effectively at the
beginning that some might not accept the film's second-half shift into
out-and-out anarchy. It's one thing to identify with an average guy who
unleashes his repressed anger through once-a-week fisticuffs; it's another to
make the cognitive leap into homegrown terrorism. I think Fincher handles the
transition as well as he can, but much like the narrator, viewers are forced to
confront the reality that the "fight club" concept is getting away from them.
It was Tyler's plan all along to destroy the foundations of consumerism, not
just find a forum for coping with it.

The
word "nihilist" gets tossed around often in reference to Fight Club—and to describe
Palahniuk's work in general—but it's really about its limitations. Sure,
Palahniuk and Fincher have little but contempt for our gelded society, and
they'd no doubt endorse bits of homespun Durdenisms like "the things you own
end up owning you." But once Tyler creates "Project Mayhem"
independently—in a manner of speaking—from the narrator, that's
where he and the filmmakers part ways. Splicing single frames of pornography
into family films, as Tyler does, is good for a subversive laugh, but once he
becomes a messianic figure and trains men to contribute mindlessly to a
terrorist cause, the cure starts to look worse than the disease. (Of course,
it's impossible to imagine the film being made after 9/11, no matter Fincher's
level of responsibility. It's also impossible to consider the film outside of
that context, since the destruction of the World Trade Center—a symbol of
American enterprise—so closely mirrors Durden's mission. The only
difference is that Durden takes steps to ensure that nobody is in the buildings
when they're detonated, which is more Weather Underground than al-Qaeda.)

Fight
Club builds
to the big revelation that Tyler and the narrator are, in fact, two sides of
the same person, a metaphysical twist that Fincher and screenwriter Jim Uhls
take great pains to execute. It's the kind of gimmicky conceit to which I
usually object in movies, one so outrageous that it feels like a cheat. (See
also: a certain extreme French horror film from 2003, which makes virtually the
same revelation seem shockingly stupid.) But on repeat viewings, I've come to
appreciate just how often the filmmakers hint at the twist, from the
flash-frames of Tyler that are spliced in before his appearance to the many
references in the voiceover narration ("everywhere I went, I felt I had already
been there," et al.) to the fact that Tyler and Marla (who becomes lovers, to
the narrator's horror) never actually appear together at the same time.

If
the film has a flaw, it's that Marla amounts to little more than a deux ex machina, existing mostly as a
pinball who ricochets between the dueling sides of the narrator's personality.
In light of the twist, we can see why Marla acts so mystified by her
boyfriend's ever-changing moods. ("You fuck me, you snub me. You love me, you
have me. You show me a sensitive side, then you turn into a total asshole.") I
don't think we'd buy the metaphysical leap without Marla bridging the gap. But
make no mistake: Fight
Club is by
men, for men, and about men, and Marla serves a purpose without becoming a
force unto herself.

Still,
is it wrong to feel a rush in the final sequence, as Marla and the narrator
clasp hands while buildings collapse to the tune of the Pixies' "Where Is My
Mind?" It takes me back to the very first New Cult Canon entry, Donnie Darko, which also gave viewers a
seductive invitation to the apocalypse, as a corrupt world yields to a new one
while the songs of Echo & The Bunnymen, Tears For Fears, and Duran Duran
ring in the background. Both films speak to the cult impulse to lay waste to
conventional architecture and see the world from a fresh angle. To that end, at
least, Tyler Durden would approve.